Paid under $600 for my current laptop and runs like a champ. Does everything I listed above. The only complaint if I had one is it gets hot when using Photoshop, Movie Maker and Power Director at the same time.


Edit, also, just found out we get a discount if we buy through Dell.com using the companies employee purchase plan.

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Make sure to check out newegg.com and tigerdirect.com before you drop the money. They have some sweet deals sometime, if you know what you're looking for.

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Of course you could just buy a MacBookPro and the snazzy keyboard (with a num keypad). Then you would even look cool. :)

Of course you also couldnt do it for 700...or probably 1700. :(

(Obviously I have nothing to add to this thread, but I felt like opining anyway.)

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Well, you get what you pay for. I've always said people who run windows deserve what they get, kind of like Vikings fans.

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I never make any computer purchase without checking NewEgg.com  first. They have great prices, fast shipping and they are very good about returns. Even if you don't buy from there, almost everything they sell has a lot of user reviews, so you can see what other people think.

This $699 Toshiba  might do, for example...

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Superior hardware for less $$$?
Rock-solid operating systems that don't mask their problems by having a restrictive business model (controlling all the hardware put into apple machines)?

Yes, we do get what we pay for. Sorry, Win 7 > OS X 1.6 (or are they on 10.7 now). Windows XP, while it had its flaws, was "modern" for a hell of a lot longer than any Apple OS. And MS didn't charge you $90 for upgrading to SP2 or SP3, which had more differences from release Windows XP than some of the earlier 10.x OSs.

You like the OS? Great. I like how it feels too. But don't ignore all the pluses of windows just to either be an annoying troll or a blatant fanboy that throws insults like VIKINGS FAN around. Apple's core market isn't computers because the only way they'll ever have a chance to actually put a dent in Windows' share of the market is to give up their hardware monopoly. When they do that, their profit margin goes WAY down, and they need to rely on OS sales for profit. And there's no way in hell that's going to happen anytime soon.

I'm liking that, but is a 1.6 quad core that much better than a 2.0 dual core?

Mathematically, the answer is obvious, but math is deceiving me when it comes to processing power.

6.4 > 4.0 obviously, but there's more to it than that. FSB, Memory, etc.

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And the fact that a single process can only be worked on by a single core. Unless your video editing software has GOOD support for multiple core processing those two cores are just going to sit there doing nothing.

So quad core is only good if your software utilizes it?

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dual or quad core?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/choosing-dual-or-quad-core.html 

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